The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

The Sopranos writers know a portion of their audience doesn’t like the dreams. And they don’t care.

  “People complained to me about it,” says writer/producer Terence Winter, “and I said, ‘The opening shot of this series is a guy in a psychiatrist’s office. You think maybe the show is going to deal with dreams and psychology?’ That’s how you’ve met Tony Soprano, so the show deals with that stuff. So if you’re interested in Tony Soprano, aren’t you interested in what he thinks about, what he dreams about? You would hope. Unfortunately, some people, all they’re interested in is the Mob [stuff]. Everyone has their own thing. You can’t please everybody.”

  “I know people complain about them, but we come by them honestly,” agrees creator David Chase. “This is the story of a therapy patient, and dreams form a lot of that.”

  ______

  Chase, who scripts most of the dream sequences, acknowledges that “because we do a psychiatric show, [the dreams] are interpretable.” However, the symbolism doesn’t always come out intentionally. Chase and the writers try to let the dream imagery “come from our subconscious,” he said.

  While he was writing “Funhouse,” the image of Tony riding a bicycle to a fish market came into his head, and then he remembered the success he had on Northern Exposure using digital technology to create a talking dog. From there, he wound up with Pussy as a talking fish, which in turn evoked the old Godfather line about sleeping with the fishes.

  “So you have to wonder why, in my mind, subconsciously, he rode up to a fish market. I wasn’t thinking, ‘Let’s do it, it’ll be cool because he sleeps with the fishes.’ It just started with this guy, he’s riding somewhere, he’s on a bicycle, and it turned out to be a fish market. And to me, that’s kind of like a real dream. And then I realized, ‘Oh, he sleeps with the fishes.’ And then that led to the whole thing where [Pussy really] went into the ocean at the end.”

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  The Hits Keep on Coming: David Chase Talks about 10 Musical Sopranos Moments

  BY ALAN SEPINWALL | 3/8/2006

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  I ASKED DAVID CHASE to talk about the origins of ten of the show’s best musical moments. In chronological order:

  The song: The classic lullaby “All Through the Night” (in season one’s “Denial, Anger, Acceptance”)

  The scene: As Tony and Carmela beam at Meadow and her school choir’s holiday performance, Mikey Palmice shoots Christopher’s friend Brendan in the bathtub.

  Chase: “If you look back on it, that’s a Godfather move. I don’t think I realized it at the time.”

  The song: Frank Sinatra’s wistful “It Was A Very Good Year” (in season two’s “Guy Walks into a Psychiatrist’s Office”)

  The scene: The first of the season-opening montages, as we catch up on what all the characters have been up to (Livia doing physical therapy, Dr. Melfi working out of a motel room, Meadow learning to drive, Tony catting around, etc.) since the end of the surprisingly successful season one.

  Chase: “It was a very good year. Our first year was a really good year.”

  The song: Sinatra’s jaunty “Baubles, Bangles, and Beads” (in season two’s “Funhouse”).

  The scene: Tony, Paulie, and Silvio confront Pussy about working with the FBI, then kill him.

  Chase: “Musically, that song is so interesting and lilting and just floats, you know. It had nothing do with the fact of money or jewels. Sometimes, these lyrics kind of get in the way.”

  The song: A mash-up (in the days before most people knew what a mash-up was) of The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” and the theme from the ’50s private eye show Peter Gunn (in season three’s “Mr. Ruggerio’s Neighborhood”)

  The scene: FBI agents tail members of the Soprano family as they prepare to plant a listening device in Tony’s basement.

  Chase: “My wife said, ‘You know that “Every Breath You Take” and the “Peter Gunn” theme are the same song?’ And we played them and I said, ‘Oh, they sort of are.’ She has song-writing credit on that episode. ‘Every Breath You Take’ was interesting for that sequence, and Peter Gunn is the Feds’ gangbuster music.”

  The song: The Kinks’ dread-filled “Living on a Thin Line” (in season three’s “University”)

  The scene: Used both as the dancing music for Tracee the stripper and a recurring theme to suggest her impending demise.

  Chase: “There is this lyric about how there’s no England now. I get chills thinking about that now, as we’re talking about it.” (Writer/producer Terence Winter adds, “I’ve got more emails and questions from friends about what that song was than anything else we’ve used in the show’s history.”)

  The song: “Black Books,” Nils Lofgren’s ethereal ballad about a woman with a wandering eye (in season three’s “Second Opinion”)

  The scene: Used twice, first as Carmela feels lonely and unwanted as she waits in the hall of Meadow’s dorm; then, after debating whether to leave Tony, she gets him to donate a big chunk of money to Meadow’s school, just so she can feel he did one nice thing for her lately.

  Chase: “It’s just a beautiful song. Nils’s guitar playing is luminous.”

  The song: The relentless beat of “World Destruction,” by Time Zone (in season four’s “For All Debts Public and Private”)

  The scene: First heard as Tony waddles down the driveway to get his season-opening copy of the Star-Ledger, then again at the end as Christopher pins the $20 bill he took from the cop who allegedly killed his father to his mother’s fridge.

  Chase: “That episode was written the week of September 11, or thereabouts. Very presciently, Afrika Bambaataa and John Lydon had sung about [being brainwashed by religion]. That song’s from, what, 1985?

  The song: “Dawn (Go Away),” by Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons (in season four’s “Christopher”)

  The scene: On the way back from an Indian casino where they’ve just been blackmailed into booking Frankie Valli, Tony and Silvio have a debate about Italian American pride and harmful stereotypes. Tony replies to Sil’s last opinion by barking, “Take it up with Frankie Valli when you talk to him” a split-second before the credits roll and the song cues up.

  Chase: [Laughing] “You may not know this, but the Four Seasons are Italian American. . . . And that scene was about Italian Americans. It had to do with that whole thing Tony’s telling Silvio about class differences.”

  The song: The Chi-Lites’ soaring love song “Oh Girl” (in season four’s “Watching Too Much Television”)

  The scene: After giving Assemblyman Zellman the okay to date his ex-mistress Irina, Tony hears “Oh Girl” on his car stereo and starts to cry. So he drives to Zellman’s house, gives Irina a possessive, yearning look, and savagely beats Zellman with a belt.

  Chase: “Just a great song. Certain people who really run from their emotions are very sentimental. It’s hard for them to acknowledge true emotions, but they wallow in sentimentality. And that kind of a song, if you’re driving along, late at night and that song comes on, it gets you.”

  The song: Another Kinks number, “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” (in season five’s “Cold Cuts”)

  The scene: Tony is annoyed to see that Janice’s anger management therapy is working much better for her than his sessions with Melfi ever have for him, so he so thoroughly humiliates her at dinner that she descends into a homicidal rage—at which point Tony triumphantly exits and walks home, accompanied by The Kinks.

  Chase: [Laughing] “This one’s pretty self-explanatory. . . . My favorite thing about that song is it’s a live version, and Ray Davies is singing, and then he says, What are ya?’ and 10,000 people say in unison, ‘I’m not like everybody else!’”

  SEASON SEVEN: 2007

  Crimes of Fashion

  BY ALAN SEPINWALL | 4/8/2007

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  SOPRANOS COSTUME DESIGNER Juliet Polcsa was recently at a fitting with Edie Falco when she had a disturbing epiphany.

  “I went, ‘Oh my God, is somethin
g wrong with me? I like this,’” Polcsa recalls with a laugh.

  Since the pilot, Polcsa has been responsible for crafting or perfecting the look of virtually every character on the show, from Adriana’s animal prints to Ralphie’s ascots.

  After Polcsa receives a script and meets with the writer and director, she figures out how many costume changes will be involved in the hour—100 to 120 is the average, though a recent show went up to 160—and then she and her team begin to shop. They visit stores all over the area, from department stores like Macy’s to small men’s shops in Bensonhurst and Howard Beach that outfit the real-life versions of Tony and Johnny Sack.

  ______

  For the series regulars, the clothes they wear help define whom they’re playing. Steve Van Zandt never feels in character until he’s in full costume. As a sign of how much he values Silvio’s clothes, he buys his full wardrobe at the end of every season, even though he would never wear most of it off-camera.

  (Also buying old wardrobe, for a different reason: Tony Sirico, whose fashion sense is so close to Paulie Walnuts’s that Polcsa once dressed him in a shirt identical to one in Sirico’s closet at home. “A year later, he ripped his own shirt and he said, ‘I need that shirt as a replacement.’”)

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  Choreographing the Whack

  BY ALAN SEPINWALL | 4/9/2007

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  WHEN TONY SOPRANO puts a hit out on someone, it’s time to call Pete Bucossi.

  The North Plainfield [New Jersey] native has been the stunt coordinator for The Sopranos from the very start, and over the course of nine years and seventy-seven episodes, he’s helped orchestrate stabbings, shootings, car crashes, hangings, and other manners of death and dismemberment.

  ______

  One of the series’ longest, most brutal fight scenes was the season four kitchen brawl between Tony and Ralphie, which ended with Ralphie’s death (and later beheading). Much of it, like Ralphie spraying Tony’s eyes with Raid, was in the script, while other parts had to be negotiated in rehearsal.

  “That was pretty complex,” Bucossi explains. “You’re working with props, there was some breakaway glass. You want to take it to a limit, almost where Ralphie’s head is going through the floor. It’s pretty detailed in the script, and for a major fight, we have the luxury of rehearsals.”

  The show’s leading man also happens to be its most accomplished physical performer, which comes in handy, considering how often Tony is the one involved in a fight.

  “Obviously, Jimmy [Gandolfini] can handle himself. He’s a big and powerful-looking man already, but he’s always concerned with not hurting anybody, making it look good. He’s great.”

  A memorable scene in season three had Tony picking up mistress Gloria and hurling her to the floor. During rehearsal, there was debate over exactly how Tony should grab the much smaller woman, both for practical purposes and to make it look good.

  “I don’t remember if it was scripted as by the throat or her clothes, but she was in a nightgown, so we knew, obviously, if he grabbed her by the clothes, they would be ripped. He’s got some big paws on him. I think Jim came up with the idea, ‘I just grab her right by the throat.’ So then we realized she could grab onto his hand with her hand and she could hold onto him and he could easily lift her. That was a happy marriage right there. And then we had a stunt double that took the fall.”

  Even the most basic stunt requires heavy preparation, sometimes just to reassure the actor. When Eugene Pontecorvo hung himself in last season’s premiere, Bucossi made sure to put actor Robert Funaro into the two-piece harness a few days ahead of time, “just to know he’s not going to hang himself.” In the end, Funaro’s relative comfort with the stunt allowed the director to linger for a long time on Eugene dangling from the end of the rope, turning a stock bit of movie magic into something unsettlingly different.

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  Setting the Scene

  BY ALAN SEPINWALL | 4/8/2007

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  WHEN SOPRANOS PRODUCTION designer Bob Shaw and location manager Regina Heyman were tasked in season three with finding a home for Tony’s new mistress, Gloria Trillo, both assumed they would put her in a high-rise apartment in Fort Lee or some other New York–adjacent location where a single career woman might live.

  Then, they sat down with David Chase, who insisted, “No, no, she lives in some cabin in the woods! She’s a witch!”

  After picking her jaw up off the floor, Heyman sent her team of location scouts out to find just such a cabin. They looked and they looked, and every promising candidate was nixed because the location was too remote to get the entire production crew into. Finally, on a complete fluke, one of the scouts was driving past the Friar Tuck Inn on Route 23 in Cedar Grove and noticed a small cabin tucked right behind the inn.

  And, after all that effort, the exterior of the cabin was glimpsed only briefly on-screen, while the interior of Gloria’s home was built from scratch on the stages at Silvercup Studios in Long Island City.

  Welcome to the world of Heyman and Shaw, who, since the start of season two, have been responsible for finding or building (or, in some cases, both) the places where Tony Soprano and company live, work and, occasionally, whack.

  When Uncle Junior went under house arrest in season two, that meant he needed a house, and Shaw knew from his own childhood and the relatives from the Italian side of his family just what the place should look like.

  “He was from an older generation. In those days, they didn’t have aspirations to become part of the upper middle class, the way Tony and Carmela are. And older people, they just don’t move, they say, ‘This is my house.’ We also assume that, never having been married, from that generation, he never moved out of his parents’ home, so the last renovation that Junior’s house had was in the ’50s. People always wonder why, if he’s the de facto Mob boss, does he live in such a crummy house, but it’s actually a very accurate thing in terms of that generation of Italian Americans and the way the Mob used to be.”

  Chase has near-total recall of all the places he lived and visited while growing up in New Jersey and is very specific about what he wants and what he doesn’t. While picking a location for Dr. Melfi’s house, Shaw never noticed a hanging mirror in the foyer, and the way a scene was shot, the mirror was clearly showing a hat collection out of frame.

  “David saw the scene,” Shaw recalls, “and he was very upset and said, ‘Melfi does not have a collection of hats!’”

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  Sopranos Creator’s Last Word: End Speaks for Itself

  BY ALAN SEPINWALL | 6/12/2007

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  WHAT DO YOU do when your TV world ends? You go to dinner, then keep quiet.

  Sopranos creator David Chase took his wife out for dinner Sunday night in France, where he fled to avoid “all the Monday morning quarterbacking” about the show’s finale. After this exclusive interview (agreed to before the season began), he intends to let the work—especially the controversial final scene—speak for itself.

  “I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there,” he says of the final scene.

  “No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God,” he adds. “We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people’s minds or thinking, ‘Wow, this’ll [tick] them off.’

  “People get the impression that you’re trying to [mess] with them, and it’s not true. You’re trying to entertain them.”

  ______

  “Anybody who wants to watch it, it’s all there,” says Chase.

  Some fans have assumed the ambiguous ending was Chase setting up the oft-rumored Sopranos movie.

  “I don’t think about [a movie] much,” he says. “I never say never. An idea could pop into my head where I would go, ‘Wow, that would make a great movie,’ but I doubt it.

  “I’m not being coy,” he adds. “If something appeared that really made a good Sopranos movie and you could invest in it and eve
rybody else wanted to do it, I would do it. But I think we’ve kind of said it and done it.”

  Another problem: Over the last season, Chase killed so many key characters. He’s toyed with the idea of “going back to a day in 2006 that you didn’t see, but then [Tony’s children] would be older than they were then and you would know that Tony doesn’t get killed. It’s got problems.” (Earlier in the interview, Chase noted that often his favorite part of the show was the characters telling stories about the good ol’ days of Tony’s parents. Just a guess, but if Chase ever does a movie spinoff, it’ll be set in Newark in the ’60s.)2

  Meanwhile, remember that twenty-one-month hiatus between seasons five and six? That was Chase thinking up the ending. HBO’s then-chairman Chris Albrecht came to him after season five and suggested thinking up a conclusion to the series; Chase agreed, on the condition he get “a long break” to decide an ending.

  Originally, that ending was supposed to occur last year, but midway through production, the number of episodes was increased, and Chase stretched out certain plot elements while saving the major climaxes for this final batch of nine.

  “If this had been one season, the Vito storyline would not have been so important,” he says.

  Much of this final season featured Tony bullying, killing, or otherwise alienating the members of his inner circle. After all those years of viewing him as “the sympathetic Mob boss,” were we, like his therapist Dr. Melfi, supposed to finally wake up and smell the sociopath?

  “From my perspective, there’s nothing different about Tony in this season than there ever was,” Chase says. “To me, that’s Tony.”

  Chase has had an ambivalent relationship with his fans, particularly the bloodthirsty whacking crowd who seemed to tune in only for the chance to see someone’s head get blown off (or run over by an SUV). So was he reluctant to fill last week’s penultimate episode, “The Blue Comet,” with so many vivid death scenes?